


Preparations

by embroiderama



Series: The Spellbound Future [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1970s, F/M, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 11:36:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John wants everything to be just right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Preparations

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow-up to [Beside You](http://embroiderama.livejournal.com/88194.html).

John stood in the middle of his new apartment and looked around, trying to see the place through Mary's eyes. It was a dump. She'd think it was a dump, no doubt. John took home decent money now, working at the garage, but every dollar he could manage was going into saving for a house. A house for Mary, even though she didn't know about it yet. The extra money he was getting since he'd signed up for the Reserves helped a lot, but when it came down to it he didn't need anything more than a bunk and chow. Not right now.

Not that the Reserves wasn't a pain in his ass some of the time. He'd joined for Mary, for their future--for Mary who was his future--but her last break had fallen during his two weeks of re-training, and the break before that he'd been called out to help with keeping order after a tornado in Missouri. Three years until Mary graduated, four years until he finished the active part of his Reserves duty. He could make it work.

He kept the place clean, but it was still nothing to look at. The sofa was worn and sprung and smelled like wet dog, even after a month. The coffee table was scuffed and wobbly, the bed was nothing but a mattress on the floor, and his things were in old milk crates he'd found outside the grocery store. For god's sake, his only decoration was a weapon. He won the dagger in a poker game back in Saigon, and now the knife hung on his wall, hilt balanced between two nails. He'd taken it down half a dozen times in the past hour, but the wall looked blank and stupid without anything on it, and the knife was pretty in it's way.

Mary should be there any minute. He did one last pass over the apartment, snagging a stray sock from the corner of the bathroom and putting it in the milk crate he used for a hamper. The kitchen only had enough mismatched plates and bowls and coffee mugs to sparsely fill up one shelf of the cabinet, but two sparkly clean new glasses sat upside down on a towel next to his sink. And two new stone coasters sat on his ancient coffee table.

He couldn't sit, waiting to hear her knock on the door, so he paced, and he tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans. In his right pocket, car keys. A totally cherry jet black Impala, and his boss was willing to sell it to him with no down payment. Just $25 out of his paycheck every week and a promise to let Mike sleep on his couch if he had a big fight with his wife again. With the car, he could get to work faster, no messing around with the bus, and he could get over to check on his mother more often.

And Mary--five dollars of gas would get him to Des Moines and back. He couldn't stay over at her dorm, but the six-hour round trip would be worth it to take her out to dinner, to maybe feel her hands on him in the backseat of that car.

And in his left pocket, a tiny cardboard box poked in against his thigh and pressed out against the denim of his jeans. Inside, nestled in a layer of cotton batting, lay his mother's pearl pendant. He bought a new chain for it to replace the old one with the broken clasp, but the pendant itself was his mother's best piece of jewelry, next to her wedding band. The family story was that Pop's father had bought it in Paris before he shipped home in 1919, but for all John knew his old man had won it in a poker game.

Either way, it glowed like a full moon hanging down from the chain, and he knew it would look beautiful against Mary's throat. It would hang right in that divot between her collar bones, the place where he'd kissed her, tasting sweat and perfume, and felt her sigh on his tongue. He hoped, by Christmas, to have enough to put a ring on her finger, and then they could get engaged for real, but he thought she would understand the necklace as the kind of promise he wasn't very good at making with words.

Her knock sounded at the door. She'd given him a reason to put his life together; he'd give her everything he could.

~~~

_The list of words I used: car, dagger, pearl, sock, coaster _


End file.
